A Lebanese blog reading politics, books and civil society events

The Mulla’s Time Machine – when theocracy flattens the future

A peculiar report from Iran’s Fars news announcing the birth of an Iranian time machine soon appeared on the timelines of international media stations. The news provoked a wide wave of comments and scientific criticism in the west to which the Fars responded by silently removing the report from its page. Aside from the scientific critique of such a claim the socio-political impact of this alleged attempt of invading the private space of individual future should be addressed…

Gary Clement on Iran’s time machine

Had it been the news of an ordinary scientific achievement or pseudoscientific claim the event would have been less significant. But an alleged time machine that can “predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual” cannot just pass without being noticed. For the Iranian semi-official news agency such an achievement may seem so natural. There is nothing in the theological logic that makes the detailed future unpredictable. Theological systems usually have predictions of hundreds and may be thousands of years to come in the life of our universe; what to say of the ridiculous lives of individuals. Everything is doomed and everything runs according to an already plotted plan that cannot be changed. The future prediction machine fits well in such a system.

In theocratic systems the future of the world is not just predicted, it is a knowledge that is possessed by theocracy. The whole political system is based on the knowledge of the future rather than on discovering it and adapting to it. The wold in the eyes of such a system is inevitably walking the steps mentioned in the scriptures. So the future of the world is already a property they own. Now after already taking possession of the future of the universe as a whole, the individual future of each living person is yet to be possessed. In the same way as a scripture foretells the grand macro-future a time machine can tell the individual micro-future.

Afghanistan the 70’s and now. History is forced to rotate around the fixed axis of a far past.

Theocracy, on another level, has its own sort of time machine that works retrospectively. It constantly freezes the evolution of times in a certain sacred point (be it the age of the prophecy or the age of Imam’s or Salaf or the age of ecumenical councils or any other past golden age). It is of the nature of such systems to reproduce the socio-cultural picture of former ages (with or without some shy modifications). The past and the present are flattened to the same level with some slight differences that cannot be avoided practically. The only change that can take place is the one that scriptures predict, and here also the future is predicted according to the perceptions of the past; i.e. flattening the future to the same level also.

Although one can simply argue that both the scriptures and the machine have only alleged authority, but this is not the case inside theocratic systems. With theology the thin edge separating science and pseudoscience easily dissolves and the mythical and surreal stand on equal grounds with the real. In the same manner as “The Secret” is ‘scientifically’ based on the theories of American 19th century ‘Christian scientists’, there is nothing that makes a time machine less ‘scientific’ for the Iranian scientists. Even the map of earth can be seen in an Islamic scientific manner which differs from our ordinary science. Iran is creating its own Google Earth called Basir that will be released in few months. “We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality… Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the US, England and the Zionists”, says Iran’s minister of information.

So, it is not only the spiritual (metaphysical) space that theocracy nowadays is trying to occupy, nor is it the space of the past and present only. Its understanding of the nature of power makes theocratic systems invade both our real physical space and our future also. With the Middle East rolling down to the abyss of new middle ages, more and more time machines are yet to come…